The monetary cost of baking your own vs buying from a bakery or supermarket

[rickgregory]

I do think that some bread baking sites and books make bread baking sound much more complex than it really is. Talk of hydration levels etc can be off-putting unless you understand how simple they are if you do two easy things. First, go by weight, not volume and second, use metric measurements.

It's harder to intuitively see that if you want 70% hydration for 6 cups of flour you should use... wait, what's 70% of six cups? Not 4.2 cups because flour weighs much less than water and... oh god... screw that.

Let's use weight... so for 2lbs of flour, I want... 1.4lbs of water.... OK, that's easier.

But using metric, it's even simpler. For 1000 grams of flour, use 700 grams of water.

[Sam6687]

cooking is art, baking is science. precise measurements help ensure the best and repeatable results.

[rickgregory]

Sam6687 - and given how flour can vary over time and from batch to batch, volume measurements just aren't reliable so you can't always say "use X level cups" because that might be a different amount of flour this week vs next.

[surfdog]

I converted every kitchen I worked in to metric. Including my own. Sometimes there was kicking & screaming, but scaling a recipe to an "odd" number always created converts. LOL "Go ahead...count out 17 teaspoons...and while you’re at it, measure 1 1/3 cups 17 times."

[surfdog]

Many years ago I kinda got onto a bread making kick... We went for more than a year without purchasing bread.
Was it cheaper? Hard to say... If I included my time, probably not. For a "basic" loaf, possibly not...seeing as everything but "artisanal" bread can be found here fairly cheap. Baguettes are still fairly easy to find for a buck or so.
For anything unique, almost certainly less expensive to make.

But...my bread had something most store bought breads didn’t...or rather, they had ingredients that mine didn’t. Some of them have labels that look like chemistry experiments. I never had to go to a lab supplier to make mine.

The quality alone can make doing it yourself worthwhile, especially if one has the time. And once learned, it’s easy to replicate.
Besides, it’s seriously difficult to pass up freshly baked breads.

[Ground Chuck]

I'm intrigued by trying to bake my own bread after reading this? Is it that much better than store bought? And are we talking sandwich bread?!

[rickgregory]

You can bake sandwich bread if you want, though look for a recipe specifically for that since, it you want bread like you get in the store, you want something a littles softer and with a soft, not hard, crust.

But yes, baking basic breads is pretty easy. https://artisanbreadinfive.com is where I'd start (the books are very good). If you get into it http://www.thefreshloaf.com is to breadbaking what this place is to BBQ. And we're all here too.

[rickgregory]

I don't think it's fair to say "well, if I include my time, it's not cheaper" unless you do that with everything you cook. And then where do you stop? When grilling a steak, is it the time to active cook on the grill or the prep time? Presalting time? What about the cost to buy and hold the meat??? And good god, what about sous vide long cooks or a 14 hour brisket?

Of course we don't do that with home cooking. We do it because we like it, because it IS more expensive to go out in actual cash outlay, because we can cook Cuisine A better than anything close to us... etc. Bread should be evaluated the same. If you don't like doing it, don't want to fuss with the measurements, wait for the rise, care about the quality of ingredients, then don't bake. It's not really worth the monetary savings unless you're running close to the bone... at most, we're talking maybe a $4-5 per loaf and thats talking about artisanal bread.

[parkerj2]

I could go on for a long time about this subject, because when I cook anything, cost isn't part of the thought process (of course the "can i afford it" is - I mean to say the "is it cheaper to buy?").

For me, there's so many layers. Provide for family, sense of accomplishment, Christian obligation to respect God's gifts of nature and food, not leaving everything in regards to my food and health up to a handful of companies that don't respect humans or animals, etc.

Figure out YOUR reasons, and the "cheaper or not" doesn't matter, financial security notwithstanding.